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Books
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September 1995
The Moral State of Marriage
by Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead
THE
BEST IS YET TO COME:
Coping
With Divorce and Enjoying Life Again
by Ivana Trump. Pocket Books, 269 pages,
$23.00.
THE
GOOD MARRIAGE:
How
and Why Love Lasts
by Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee. Houghton
Mifflin, 352 pages, $24.95.
FABULOUS divorce used to be the
prerogative of the rich and famous, but not anymore. Over the past three
decades, as divorce has become fully democratized, there has been a growing
demand by the "little people" (in Leona Helmsley's memorable phrase) for the
secrets of fabulous divorce. And who better to instruct the masses than
America's most celebrated ex-wife, Ivana Trump?
Since her high-profile split from Donald, Ivana's life and fortunes have
improved. She has ventured into fiction with two novels, For Love Alone
and Free to Love, and has moved into a successful sales career with her
signature line of clothing, cosmetics, and jewelry, now available on the Home
Shopping Network. Better still, since her divorce she has lost weight, gained a
new beau, and made the best-dressed list. Now Ivana seeks to reach other women
going through divorce with the inspirational message in the title of her book:
The Best Is Yet to Come.
Her book breaks new ground in one important way. Scores of advice books on
divorce have appeared over the past two decades, but in popular advice
literature, as in so many other domains of life, there is a gender gap. Divorce
books for women emphasize personal growth and liberation, while those for men
emphasize "winning" at the game of divorce (typical examples are Divorced
Women, New Lives for women, and Winning Your Divorce:A Man's Survival
Guide). In The Best Is Yet to Come, Ivana bridges the gender gap
with the ultimate divorce fantasy. She shows women how to boost their savings
accounts and their self-esteem, not to mention their faces and fannies. As she
puts it, divorce is the ultimate makeover.
On the financial-makeover side Ivana's advice is straightforward: "get yourself
a great settlement--and before you do, take his wallet to the cleaners." Of
course, some women don't know the first thing about their husbands' financial
status, so it may be necessary to do some snooping and spying: "In this game we
call divorce, whoever has the most information wins." Ivana recommends a kind
of grown-up version of a treasure hunt, in which wives search for clues to
their husbands' net worth by following a paper trail of credit-card bills, bank
statements--indeed, anything "that comes to the house with a dollar sign on
it." Somewhere, she predicts, is the prize--that little piece of paper on which
men write down what they're worth: stocks, cash, property, the whole caboodle.
"I don't know exactly why men do this," her financial guru shrugs. "I just know
they do." You can almost hear the Czech-born Ivana heave a weary Old World sigh
of assent.
On the self-esteem and personal-growth side, divorce requires a complete
overhaul. Throwing out a spouse is like cleaning out a messy closet. You get
rid of the stuff from last year and the mistakes from the year before, the
detritus and junk of the past. The emotional airing-out gives women a chance to
take stock, to look at themselves critically. "Have you been living in the
fashion past?" Ivana gently chides, before delivering the hardball truth:
Marriage puts too many women in a rut. Married women lose their sense of self,
their competitive edge, their initiative and independence. Their sex lives
become boring and predictable. However upsetting and unexpected, therefore, the
breakup of a marriage brings a bracing shock of recognition: "I've been letting
myself go."
Next Ivana suggests a good, cleansing shopping spree: "Get rid of your grungy
married-woman's underwear and go for the colors and the silks and the lace."
The shopping spree is fun, a chance to take last revenge on your
soon-to-be-ex's American Express card. But the hard work of the divorce
makeover lies ahead. Divorce is a chance to shed old skin: Ivana strongly
advises the use of alphahydroxy acid, a key ingredient in her new Ivana line of
cosmetics, to exfoliate the skin. If you're still feeling saggy, she concedes,
you may have to consult a plastic surgeon. "Explore. Experiment. See? There are
very nice words that start with `ex.'"
The Best Is Yet to Come is a cross between Lifestyles of the Rich and
Divorced and a Home Shopping Network infomercial. Ivana has the innocence
of the very rich ("Who knew cars had to be inspected once a year? Perhaps till
now you had a driver who took care of such things"). But she also has the
instincts of a natural-born seller: "By the time this book is in your hands,"
she writes on page five, "Ivana perfume will be available for you to enjoy."
In sharing the secrets of successful divorce, Ivana tries her darndest to be
democratic. Her own revenge shopping spree focused on fancy bed linens
("Pratesi and Frette--very expensive, but they'll last forever"), but she
expresses sensitivity to women from all economic walks of life: "You can do
plenty of damage in Caldor's." Still, as the ex-Mrs. Trump confesses, she's
"more a Le Cirque person than a Taco Bell person," and her Le Cirque side takes
over as she shares her secrets of how to dismiss household staff and how to
shop for a good plastic surgeon and a personal trainer. It is hard to be mad at
Ivana, though, because every page or two you have to put down the book and
laugh. In fact, The Best Is Yet to Come is the funniest book on divorce
I've ever read.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to treat the book as a joke. Like all
great marketers, Ivana is culturally adept as well as commercially astute. She
has a great feel for the mainstream values she seeks to exploit, and her book,
properly read and appreciated, tells us much about what is distinctive about
the American way of divorce.
For one thing, Ivana's commercial exploitation of divorce is thoroughly in the
American grain. A century ago western state legislators and entrepreneurs made
divorce a staple of their economic-development strategy by setting the
residency requirement for divorce at a mere few months, attracting easterners
to their hotels and resorts. Today the commerce in divorce has gone far beyond
the schemes of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs. Over the past three decades a
huge divorce industry, with a booming professional service sector of lawyers,
therapists, financial experts, and child psychiatrists, has sprung up to
harvest the fruits of family discord. The commercial tradition may help to
explain why polls show that Republicans are more tolerant of divorce than
Democrats and why Republican leaders, for all their high-minded talk of family
values, are skittish about criticizing divorce.
If marketplace values are part of an established divorce tradition, divorce has
only recently been harnessed to the great American tradition of
self-improvement. Nonetheless, the idea that marital breakup can contribute to
personal growth and fulfillment--a new and better you--has enormous appeal in
the nation with the highest divorce rate in the industrialized world. Although
most divorce-advice books cast self-improvement in psychological terms, as part
of emotional growth, Ivana's approach harks back to a much older tradition:
Ivana is the self-made woman, getting on in the world through pluck and luck
(and a multimillion-dollar divorce settlement). Her view of the "game" of
divorce is equally quaint, recalling the bad old days of fault-based divorce,
when private detectives skulked around seedy motels, and wives looked for
lipstick on collars. Nonetheless, her larger themes are central to the
contemporary divorce culture. The association of divorce with a new life, a
renewed spirit, an awakening from a slumberous and zombie-like marital
existence, pervades popular American thinking on marital breakup. Too, Ivana's
persona as a woman "made over" through her divorce reflects broader cultural
ideas about divorce as the means for women to take initiative and express their
independence. Men may also use divorce to escape into a new identity, but men's
propensity to divorce is associated with classic forms of bad
behavior--infidelity, alcoholism, violence --rather than with "growthful"
change.
IF divorce provides opportunities for self-invention, marriage makes no
competing cultural claims. In recent years marriage has been identified with
stasis, stagnation, or, worse, oppression and depression. Of course, Americans
haven't given up on marriage entirely, but there is evidence of growing
disenchantment. Both marriage and remarriage rates are declining, while less
formal, more easily dissoluble unions are on the rise. This disenchantment may
explain why marriage attracts so little attention from family researchers. In
fact, if you wander through college bookstores looking for scholarly studies on
the subject, you might easily conclude from the meager offerings that marriage
is a cultic practice, remote from everyday life and concerns.
Now Judith Wallerstein, a clinical psychologist who has spent many years
studying divorcing couples and their children, turns her eye on marriage. I
know Wallerstein, and therefore I can say with some confidence that she is not
a booster of marriage at all costs. However, in The Good Marriage, a
study of fifty happily married couples, including some in second marriages, she
and the writer Sandra Blakeslee offer a remarkably sunny and affecting portrait
of marriage and its satisfactions. What we learn is that a good marriage falls
into the art of the possible.
Contrary to the view that marriage stunts personal growth, Wallerstein treats
marriage as psychologically dynamic, requiring spouses to change over time in
response to each other and also to develop the capacity to adjust to external
change. This dynamic potential is the source of her cautious optimism about the
possibility of a good marriage. Marriages that work offer strong evidence that
"adults have an enormous capacity to continue to grow," just as happy second
marriages, with their potential to rekindle trust and love, offer the strongest
argument for divorce, according to Wallerstein. Perhaps the most touching
stories in the book deal with "rescue marriages," in which people who have
grown up in less than perfect families--even some who have experienced
traumatic emotional or physical abuse--create marriages that "undo earlier
suffering" and repair psychic damage.
Unlike Tolstoy's happy families, however, happy marriages are not all alike.
These partnerships range from the traditional, with sharp gender divisions in
family roles and responsibilities, to the egalitarian, where bread-winning and
child-rearing tasks are shared. Wallerstein takes no ideological position on
which type of marriage is best, but one of the book's most fascinating insights
is that the egalitarian marriage, the model most highly prized and increasingly
pursued by many younger Americans, is "frighteningly fragile." Married couples
with demanding careers can be pulled apart by jealousy, competitiveness,
loneliness, worries about children, or sheer sleep deprivation. Worse, their
taut working lives leave little room for midcourse adjustments, let alone
unscheduled crises with a child who doesn't play by the developmental rule
book. Of all marriage types, therefore, this one requires the most constant
vigilance and the most heroic effort.
More broadly, however, this study suggests that the challenges of marriage are
essentially moral. That, I suspect, is why it is called The Good Marriage
rather than The Happy Marriage. The book implicitly presents
marriage as a school of virtue, a domain that requires tact and restraint along
with open and honest communication, kindness and gratitude along with
assertiveness and autonomy. Take the matter of fighting. Good marriages are not
free of conflict. However, the conflict is governed by a respect for the
partner's deepest vulnerabilities. No matter how fierce the anger, it stops
short of the cruelest cut. Spouses learn what the relationship can tolerate
without breaking.
At the same time, marriage requires the exercise of moral imagination. One
thing the couples in these good marriages have in common is a vision of the
marriage as a "superordinate" entity--something that is separate from and
larger than its two parts. The men and women in this study speak of protecting
"the marriage" almost as if it were their child; it is a creation they cherish
and share. In another sense, too, good marriages are expressions of the
imagination. These happily married people see their spouses as essentially
admirable and good--as morally worthy. Many express admiration for their
partners' conscience or honesty, or praise their courage in overcoming earlier
obstacles in life. (Drawing on her research on divorce, Wallerstein observes
that many people whose marriages eventually fail never had an idealized image
of their partners to begin with.)
Much of what I have described is never made explicit. In fact, one of the nice
things about The Good Marriage is its modesty. It doesn't pretend to
offer a philosophy or even a lecture on marriage. It takes no position on the
ideologically charged issues of women's marital roles and status. Equally
important, it ignores the two most common ways of talking about marriage--as a
contract negotiated between two equal parties and as the pathway to individual
fulfillment. For this reason it is refreshingly free of "rights" talk and
therapy talk. Indeed, Wallerstein places much more emphasis on the development
of good judgment and a moral sense than on the acquisition of effective
communication or negotiation skills.
The Good Marriage offers powerful evidence in support of a model for
relationships that are based not on theories of exchange or self-interest but
on notions of sacrifice and altruism. "I suddenly got it about ensemble work,"
an actor told Wallerstein. "Ensemble is when you work as hard for the other
guy's moment as you do for your own." The Good Marriage is an argument
for an ensemble theory of marriage.
Copyright © 1995 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
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